Ranking Puzzle or Hot Tip? Blogspot for Google+ Local Sites?

Have a ranking puzzle or actually could 'POSSIBLY BE' a hot tip. (Worth exploring/researching at least!)

I was planning to do more research and flush this post out a bit, but Colan's post today made me feel the need to just put this out there, unfinished. So will give you what I have so far, and then we can make further research about this a little group ranking puzzle project.

But I've been seeing some #1 ranking listings in some pretty competitive markets that are using...
wait for it... Blogspot.

Kinda makes me think Google likes to favor her own sites in the search results. Wait, where have I heard that before???

Below are a couple of the ugliest sites you've ever seen. These sites could seriously win the ugliest sites from 2003 awards. Spammy as heck too!

Forum Member

Interesting find, Linda. Google definitely favors one of its own. I only checked on the plumber in Milpitas, but he does have a good amount of citations, a decent amount of backlinks, and the only one in local SERPs that has any Google reviews, not to mention a few third-party reviews. So all of that combined with his Blogspot site is creating a pretty powerful listing for him. (Meanwhile, some poor plumber in Milpitas, California is on his knees right now unclogging some old lady's toilet and has no idea that several people on some online forum are analyzing his site and talking about him right now. lol)

(Meanwhile, some poor plumber in Milpitas, California is on his knees right now unclogging some old lady's toilet and has no idea that several people on an online forum are analyzing his site and talking about him right now. lol)

Inactive

I have tested this Linda and Google most defintely favors blogspot. I have created the exact same simply content for two blogs, within one hour of each other. One site was blogspot and the other was wordpress.com. Both had minimal content and blogspot crush wordpress.com and ranked much higher, much quicker than I would thought would make sense. The blogspot site even outraks the Facebook account.